A business or enterprise may be interested in planning for future operations. For example, an enterprise might want to decide if new employees should be added to the business or if another manufacturing plant should be built. To facilitate this type of business planning, predicted values of future business data elements may be generated. For example, a business might predict future sales values (e.g., on a region-by-region basis as well as an overall sales value), profits, etc. Note that predicted future business values may be based on prior actual business values. For example, a business might predict or project that revenues next year will increase 5% as compared to this year's actual revenue.
Typically, an enterprise database storing actual business data may be used by a planning application executing at an application server to generate business predictions. The planning application may request actually business data then use those values to generate predicted data at the application server. The predicted data may then be included in reports, displays, etc. to facilitate business planning. Such an approach, however, may have performance implications. For example, substantial amounts of data may be transferred from the database to the application server and/or mass operations may need to be performed at the application server. Thus, it may be desirable to facilitate implementation of business planning in connection with an enterprise database in an efficient and accurate manner.